[IxDA Discuss] Critiquing the Office 2007 (was Re: Microsoft tolicense Office 2007 UI system)

[Todd Zaki Warfel]

I didn't think it needed an explanation. But if you'd like one, then  
I'd say that iWork is a much better product in that it's more suited  
for that 95%. I work in iWork pretty much all day (in and out). I  
don't find that I need to have a large ribbon of options available to  
get my work done, which includes:
* writing proposals
* invoicing
* writing case studies
* writing reports
* making to-do lists

and a few other things that I used to do in Word.

And for Keynote, well, it blows PPT away in it's simplicity and  
straightforwardness. I did a presentation a couple of weeks ago for  
World Usability Day in Princeton and received several compliments on  
how beautiful the slides were. Now part of that might be my attention  
to simple design, but that is influenced by the environment I work in  
day-in-day-out.

Does Pages have all the features Word does? Nope. And frankly, I hope  
it stays that way. I don't need a semi tractor trailer to drive  
around town every day. Same goes for Keynote - although it does have  
much better transitions than PPT (admittedly, I only use 2-3 of them).

A couple of gripes - Pages doesn't have Track Changes. That's  
something that would be useful. And the palette model they use for  
iWork isn't that great in my opinion. It works kind of like the MS  
Ribbon in that each "collection" of features (e.g. Paragraph  
formatting options) is contained under a group. MS uses tabs, Apple  
uses buttons.

However, finding out about an undocumented feature that allows you to  
have multiple palettes open at once takes care of that gripe.

So, yes, Pages is more innovative and better in that it does what 95%  
of the people need and only has 16 elements exposed by default  
instead of 55. Or if you expose the Inspector (their version of the  
ribbon), then you're up to about 25 instead of 55. Less than half the  
clutter and in a more efficient manner.

Now, if they could just implement that contextual formatting...

On Nov 28, 2006, at 6:35 PM, Dan Saffer wrote:

> On Nov 28, 2006, at 2:04 PM, James Melzer wrote:
>
>> I'm not going to comment, except to say: http://www.apple.com/iwork/
>> pages/ ...?
>>
>
> What does that mean exactly? A link with no explanation isn't much of
> a comment. Are you suggesting Pages 2 is more innovative/better? If
> so, how and why?



Cheers!

Todd Zaki Warfel
Partner, Design & Usability Specialist
Messagefirst | designing and usability consulting
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Email:	todd at messagefirst.com
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